Free Republic

LABOR may have finally bounced off rock bottom but Australia's oldest political party and its leader are still facing a historic loss of public confidence and electoral failure. A three-point rise in the Newspoll primary vote for the ALP has avoided the unthinkable for the Gillard government of going to 25 per cent or below to have less support than the combined vote for the Greens and various odds and sods, but the broader view of this survey of public opinion about Labor - as well as the personal standing of Julia Gillard - is devastating. The electorate has not...

Labor Party wins Australian election By Bernard Lagan in Sydney Australia's long-serving conservative government not only lost yesterday's Australian election but its leader, John Howard, became only the second Prime Minister in Australia's history to lose his seat in Parliament. The Australian Labor Party, out of power nationally since 1996, stormed back into government, winning at least 20 more seats in Australia's 150-seat House of Representatives. The Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, 50, needed only 16 extra seats to form Government. Mr Rudd, a former diplomat and China specialist, will have Australia's first female deputy Prime Minister at his side -...

LABOR has warned against a knee-jerk ban on Muslim groups in the wake of the London bombings and the threat of terrorism. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is investigating Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has been banned in Britain, and is expected to deliver an assessment on its activities within days. The group has described suicide bombers as martyrs and has said Muslims have a duty to resist the occupation of Iraq. Prime Minister John Howard is planning a meeting with Australia's Muslim leaders in the next few weeks to enlist their help in exposing extremist cells, and Hizb ut-Tahrir has...

Editorial: Anglosphere's leadership is singing in tune IN an analysis of George W. Bush's election victory in the current issue of The Economist, the magazine's acerbic US commentator, "Lexington", warns the Democrats against the self-serving view that the US President won by appealing to base instincts such as fear and hatred. The Republicans "clobbered them on hope". Mr Bush was better than John Kerry at "exuding optimism" and "addressing the aspirations of an aspirational people". This is always the winning strategy in a pro-growth culture such as the US, and shows the Republicans have turned themselves into the "party of...

MARK Latham will celebrate his first anniversary as opposition leader on Wednesday, but no one is betting on him lasting to his second. If Labor looked split when Mr Latham took over the leadership last December, the rifts are gaping a year on. He has been labelled a dead parrot by a former Beazley adviser, a narcissist who won't listen to anyone by anonymous frontbenchers, and a bully by a state Labor premier. He has allegedly had an angry bust-up with factional heavyweight Stephen Conroy, accusing him of leaking internal ructions to journalists, and says one journalist has been sold...